


That Night

by endemictoearth



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Genre: Gen, Sad, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-03-20
Packaged: 2018-04-08 10:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4300938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endemictoearth/pseuds/endemictoearth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night Rae stays out until dawn from Linda's perspective. She flashes back to another horrible night when she found her daughter unconscious from self inflicted wounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Night

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is sad. Really sad. I had a glimmer of an idea brewing about this for months, and between episodes five and six and the preview for episode seven of Series 2, I needed to get my Linda feels out. I don’t expect many people to like this, it isn’t fluffy or smutty, but I had an image of Linda cleaning up Rae’s room and it lead to this. Trigger warnings galore, not sure how to tag them, but mainly for self-harm and suicide attempt.

Linda sat at the dining table, blinking into the dim light, a mixture of anger, disappointment and indigestion. She hadn’t wanted to wake Karim, so she slipped out of their bedroom to fret. Rae’s keys hadn’t turned in the lock, and she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t turn on a lamp, just opened the blinds to let in the harsh orange glow of the street lights. 

There was another twinge. It had been a long time since she was pregnant with Rae, but she didn’t remember feeling this terrible the first time. It was probably her being so old. Too old. She was happy that Karim was so happy, but some days she couldn’t face doing it all again. The lack of sleep and changing nappies was the easy part. It was the screaming fights and the staying out all night without so much as a call that were doing her in. Would she be drawing her pension and having screaming rows all at the same time?

In the quiet dark, she could hear Rae’s sodding watch clock ticking in the cupboard. She was so tired, but she couldn’t fall asleep, not knowing whether or not Rae was alright. So, she waited. Tried to watch the Open University for a bit, but it was maths and she’d always been crap at maths. Nothing else to take her mind off the waiting and the worry, so her thoughts perversely turned to that night. 

* * *

THAT NIGHT. It was the stuff of nightmares. She still had them every now and again, waking her out of a dead sleep with a gasp. Karim rubbing her shoulder and giving her that concerned look that melted her cold heart. 

She was used to blood, but it was always where it should be. In a hospital, on tile floors you could easily mop up, or collected in bags and trays. So when she walked up the stairs to her room that night, after a long shift, and the familiar salty tang filled the air, she didn’t know if it was real. She knocked on the door and called Rae’s name. 

Then again.

No reply.

She turned the knob and pushed on the door, but that stupid lock Rae had insisted on buying was there. From the sliver of light that cut into Rae’s room from the hall, Linda could see Rae’s slumped form on the floor. And then she smelled the blood again.

With all her might, she threw herself against the door. The lock budged, so she did it again. A third time and she was in.

She thanked god that she had enough experience that instinct kicked in. She grabbed a shirt from Rae’s floor to hold against the leg where most of the blood seemed to be. She tied it tight around her daughter’s thigh and ran to her room to call for an ambulance.

She knew the driver. Only in passing, but when he showed up and said her name before she could offer it, and again when he put his hand on her shoulder and said everything would be okay, she felt a bit better. 

She’d changed at the hospital after her shift. She hated going home in her uniform, all filled with germs and the smell of disinfectant that clung to everything. So, to the other people in the A & E, she just looked like another distraught mother, worried about her daughter. Which is what she was, really. She watched as they wheeled Rae into the area that people without uniforms weren’t allowed to go, and she clamped her hand over her mouth to stop the scream that was building inside her.

She’d known Rae was a little off lately. Trouble at school, girls giving her grief. But every time she’d tried to talk to Rae about it, her daughter seemed to crawl further inside herself, cross her arms, scowl at the floor and say she was alright. Linda couldn’t make her talk about it. But she honestly hadn’t seen this coming. 

Her nose burned with tears about to fall, and she sniffed, looking up at the fluorescent lights to try and keep them from slipping out. That was her little girl. Her best friend. And she’d missed all the signs. She was only a nurse practitioner, no real psychiatric experience. Yet. Still. She felt should have known.

The waiting area was terrible. Everyone bleary eyed from lack of sleep and crying, staring into frothy cups of tea from the vending machine. Fake plants with a layer of dust and magazines from the previous decade. She just wanted to run into the room where they had Rae and hold her girl’s hand through this. But she knew the rules, and she knew it wouldn’t help. 

“Mrs. Earl?” 

A nurse startled her out of her daze. It was Harriet, who worked day turn. “Oh, Linda, right! It just has Rachel’s name on the chart. Hi, I’m so sorry about this.”

“Why, what’s happened?” Linda answered in a panicked voice, her hand flying up to her throat.

“Oh, sorry! No, Rachel’s stable now. You’ll be able to see her in a little bit. I’m just sorry about the situation.”

“Oh. Well, okay.” 

“She’s lost a lot of blood, but that was quick thinking with the tourniquet. You may well have saved her with that.”

Linda nodded numbly.

She was still numb when another nurse took her in to see Rae, unconscious and with a half dozen tubes running in and out of her. Now she could take her daughter’s hand between her own, but it was limp and too cold. 

“We’ll keep her in this unit for at least a couple of days, while her cuts heal. Only one was deep enough to require internal stitches. It was probably the one that got her in here.” There was a pause while the woman took a breath. “We think Rachel should then be moved to our psychiatric unit for observation and assessment. Self-inflicted wounds, self harm, that’s a very serious concern.” 

Linda nodded gravely, still looking at her daughter’s face, thinking how odd it was to see Rae looking so peaceful.

“We … found a number of old cuts, Linda. She’s … this isn’t the first time. She’s been at this for a while.”

Finally, Linda wrenched her gaze away from Rae to look at the nurse. “What did you say?”

“I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you.”

Now the tears came, the dam bursting behind her eyes. She squeezed Rae’s hand tightly and rubbed her forearm. “My poor baby girl,” she sobbed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

* * *

Three hours later, nine hours after she’d come in the door from work, she was back home. Alone. The house was too quiet, too still. She walked back up the stairs and wanted to drop onto her bed from exhaustion, but the door to Rae’s room was ajar and she saw a corner of the bloodstain. She sighed and got a bucket from the airing cupboard and diluted a bit of bleach in some water. Picking out the oldest three towels, she put on some rubber gloves and went to work. She wanted to blame the sting of the bleach for the tears that plopped out on the damp carpet as she worked, but she knew that wasn’t true. She cried for the daughter who she’d raised to never talk about her problems, to whom she’d passed on her weight issues, the girl who joked all the time to hide her pain, who stayed in her room alone most weekends. 

If she’d only … what? She was too tired to even think what she could have done differently that wouldn’t have led to this. And that scared her more than anything. That it had been inevitable. That something in her genes or …  _his_  genes made Rae this way.

She scrubbed at the floor until her arms ached and she rubbed a particularly stubborn spot so hard it frayed. But she couldn’t get it all. There was still the faint tinge of faded rust that would forever remind them both of what had happened, just like Rae’s scars.

* * *

These were the scenes that ran through Linda’s mind in the dark. The ones that always replayed whenever Rae stayed out too late or didn’t call. She’d almost lost Rae once, and she could never forget it.

This time, she’d called everyone she could think of, and no one knew where she was, so she stopped, leaving the line free for the call from the hospital, should it come. And in between these thoughts of Rae, her second child, as yet unborn, was playing merry hell with her innards. Children tore you up, one way or another, from the moment they were conceived. And it seemed they never stopped.

So, when Rae tottered in without ceremony or the decency to play-act an apology, Linda snapped. After hours to fret and fume, her worry had turned to fury. She pelted her daughter with harsh words that had built up in her for the past eight hours. She didn’t wait for Rae to explain because there wasn’t any explanation that could make this okay. She was through being delicate with Rae’s feelings, if Rae was going to decimate hers.

And Rae hardened under the verbal assault. Linda could almost feel the temperature in the room drop as Rae cooled like a lake in winter, but Linda couldn’t bring herself to care. Rae clearly didn’t respect her or have any consideration for her, so why should she extend her the courtesy? And then Rae told her chill out, whatever, fuck you. 

The severed nerves inside Linda snapped once again.

She’d spent her whole life trying to make Rae’s life better than her own had been, without any help from anyone. And where had she ended up? She wasn’t happy. Rae wasn’t happy. Didn’t seem to love or respect her, and Linda was fed up to the back teeth of it. So if she wanted to meet her deadbeat of a father, who not only hadn’t paid a cent of maintenance, but hadn’t once tried to contact his daughter in the past ten years, despite living a kilometer away the entire time, fine. She could go and live with the bastard, or try to, anyway. 

A little part of her hoped that Victor would take Rae in. Not to relieve her of the responsibility, that would be the very definition of too little too late, but so that Rae had someone else there for her. Because she didn’t seem to care that Linda had been there her whole life. And now there was a new life that was going to require so much of her … she didn’t know if she had enough inside her. 

Maybe she’d never been enough.

* * *

As she slipped back into bed, sniffling as quietly as she could, shaking with anger and sadness, Karim turned over and put his arms around her in a tight embrace. Then he rubbed his warm hands gently over her belly and kissed her behind the ear. “Good morning, my lovely,” he murmured.

Well.

Maybe she was enough for someone.


End file.
